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Find how to avoid the top website redesign mistakes with tips from leading website development services

The main idea behind every website redesign project is the purpose to exceed current search engine optimization (SEO) factors. All you need is a faster-loading website, relevant and better-looking for your branding campaign. This is facilitated by a website structure that helps capture leads by being easy to navigate and further find valuable information effortlessly.

Ultimately, you want your site to attract, convert and retain more leads and customers. And your website development services, Ventura should be aware of it. The worst website redesign mistake your SEO services provider can make is to create a site that performs worse than the previous version.

The Simple Website Redesign Mistakes that Destroy SEO

Here are some you’ll want to avoid right from the beginning to maintain your SEO advantage.

1. Not Auditing Current SEO Elements

Failure to conduct an initial SEO audit means you and your website developer cannot retrace what worked (and to what extent) and what did not before and after the development phase for comparison. Make sure you maintain high performing elements intact. Also, keep note of elements such as image names, keywords, long-tail keywords, SEO plugins, and high-quality links on well-performing website pages for reuse after the development phase.

2. Removing/Changing Pages or Page URLs

Changing or removing pages or website page URLs (domain names) without redirecting them to relevant landing pages disconnects the site from search engines, leading to decreased indexing, visibility, and website traffic.

If you have a large website, permanently redirecting all of its pages to the new one, it can be tough and time-consuming. Instead, conduct a 301 permanent redirect for the most important landing pages such as the homepage, services, about and testimonials pages.

3. Focus on Adds

Most redesigns focus on adding more features instead of functionality. For example, you do not want to just focus on good looks at the expense of loading speed. Depending on the level of expertise your choice of Ventura website development services offers, adding more website features, especially aesthetic ones, often compromises a website loading speed, ease of navigation, and more essential functionality.

4. Block Search Engine Crawlers from the Work-In-Progress Site

Allowing search engine crawlers to crawl your unfinished site will cause the finished site to decline in ranking as the crawlers consider it duplicate content, of secondary importance, and thin content.

To avoid this, block search engine crawlers from accessing your development stage website content with no-follow and no-index instructions. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools guidelines on doing that under “Crawler Access”

Avoiding these basic website redesign mistakes will help you maintain your SEO advantage even after making major changes to your current website pages. Ultimately, you’ll want to choose the website development services Ventura has to offer if you prefer professional Ventura SEO services’ help in making the essential changes or recouping the lost SEO advantages.

If you want to take your small business website to a higher level of precision, performance and overall presence, here are 10 top design tips that you should follow closely:

Shine a Spotlight on Your Navigation Links: You may not have an index filled with website links, but you at least need to emphasize the navigation links.

Place Your Best Content at the Top: Make sure that your highest quality content is not buried within an extensive list of pages and blog posts.

Avoid Excessive Clutter: Use white space wisely and creatively within your website as an engagement tool. Cluttering your website with excessive content and images will repel customers more than attract them.

Invest in a Responsive Web Design: Responsive designs allow you to cater to desktop and mobile device users without the need for separate websites – ensuring that anyone can access your site.

Invest in High-Quality Branding: Like a traditional storefront, your website is the face of your business within the digital realm. Make sure it looks professional, orderly and approachable.

Create High-Quality Content: Whether you invest in the services of a web design company in Los Angeles and Ventura that specializes in content development or you handle the task on your own, make sure that you regularly post engaging articles and blog posts within your site.

Focus on Fast Loading Times: Studies show that customers abandon slow-loading sites within the first 4-5 seconds. Make sure that this does not happen to your site.

Study and Master the Art of SEO: Ensure that you at least follow the basic principles of SEO and avoid being penalized by Google for keyword stuffing, buying links and other black hat practices.

Integrates Calls to Action: Your website is to inform and engage your customers. Make sure that you strategically place Calls to Action throughout your website to show your customers what they need to do after they receive the information.

Do Not Hesitate to Ask for Help: You may feel as if you can handle it on your own, but quickly realize that it is overwhelming to care for it alone. Fortunately, you can invest in the expertise and guidance of a professional web design company in Los Angeles and Ventura to lighten the load and help you generate quality results.

Speed is the reason why people take Interstates over back-roads, shop at convenience stores instead of supermarkets and skip commercials with a DVR remote instead of watching them in real-time. Most consumers want to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as they can, which is exactly why your website’s page loading speed is critical. A web development services agency in Los Angeles and Venturawould tell you that “less is more” – especially if it allows you to quickly convert your short-term guests into long-term customers.

Delayed Page, Lost Customers

It has been proven by numerous studies that delays in page loading times lead to abandoned online shopping carts and dissatisfied customers. One study shows that 47 percent of consumers expect websites to load within a maximum of 2 seconds, per Business 2 Community.

The same report claims that 40 percent of consumers will leave a webpage if they must wait longer than 3 seconds for it to load completely. The “it’s worth the wait” concept clearly does not apply in this scenario, especially if they are able to leave your website and get what they want from your competitors’ site instead in a fraction of the time.

Raising Your Awareness of Loaded Content

Another key reason why you should pay close attention to your page speed is it will help you monitor your loaded content effectively. Most delays, freezes and website crashes are caused by an excessive amount of data trying to load at the same time. If your pages have a lot of integrated media, embedded images and videos and social media links, all these content items can quickly clash against each other – fighting over the same bandwidth to an extent where nothing gets done. While designing the site, you may think that all this loaded content is a perk. However, you will soon discover that it is not as advantageous as you think when you realize that not many people are sticking around long enough to access it.

Conclusion

It is true that you should want to present quality content on your company’s website. However, you also need to find a balance between quality content and expeditious loading times. In order to engage your target audience, it is very necessary to make it narrative over descriptive.

There are always times – dire times, but these exist for everyone - when a website needs to take a few hours or days of me-time. That’s not so much personal time, as it is maintenance time – time for you or your webmaster to make important changes, fix graphical errors and grammatical mistakes, use a Penguin recovery service from SeoTuners, update outdated information and generally polish the website up to be a bit better than it was yesterday.

One way or another, simply disappearing off the face of the Earth or cutting off all information on your site is a bad idea for two simple reasons: 1.) you’ll alienate visitors by presenting them with absolutely nothing when you’ve promised them content, and 2.) Google will still crawl your page if you’re not careful, and rank you according to your nonexistent, downed page.

To avoid that and make sure you get a clean, temporary break without majorly affecting your overall traffic numbers or your ranking online, take the following steps:

Get Your 503 Right

The HTML 503 error is a rather common one you may have encountered several times throughout your surfing life, and it specifically refers to an “Unavailable Service” as per Lifewire. Be sure to offer both some type of interstitial or temporary maintenance site (and perhaps a pop-up) and a 503 error.

End Crawling

In your site’s robots.txt file or through a robots meta tag, you should be able to add a quick clause that tells Google there’s nothing worth crawling here at the moment as per Google. This is down through a “disallow” directive in the document itself.

Announce the Maintenance

For regular users of your service, there’s nothing quite like unannounced maintenance. Most people can live with being slapped with a 503 on a nonessential service as long as they get a succinct and rational explanation through Facebook or your mailing list.

No matter how you choose to announce the maintenance, it’s important to do so at least about a business week in advance and with the right explanation – regular maintenance, site update, etc. As long as you keep your customers in the loop and Google happy, taking your site off for a day shouldn’t hurt you at all.

Relaunching a website after a temporary absence or restructuring carries vastly different SEO needs than launching a new website. It means that all of your previous SEO will be affected, and may have to be thrown out and started again from scratch. Search Engine Journal found that some companies lost 60 to 70 percent of their search traffic after a redesign, numbers which are difficult and expensive to build up again. This is why for this purpose, it is especially important to find the right Los Angeles and Ventura internet marketing company who can bring in new visitors and redirect your existing visitors. These are the steps that they will use, which you can begin making yourself before your campaign even starts:

Audit the Old Site

It may seem strange to look over your old website with a fine toothcomb, but it is an important part of making your new website successful. Look into what parts brought in high traffic and which ones didn’t. Are there any areas that could be improved in your new site? Your Los Angeles and Ventura internet marketing company can use this data to make your new site even better than the previous one.

Inbound Link Analysis

A useful job your SEO firm can perform is an inbound link analysis. Inbound links are an especially important part of SEO that you want to avoid losing if you can so it is best to know which sites are still linking to your site.

Think SEO

Moz says that the reason many websites fail after a redesign is that the creators didn’t put SEO into consideration when designing and building it. If you already have content that is bringing in high numbers of visitors, copy it over to your new site. Don’t forget to redirect all of the old URL’s so that search engines will know where your content has moved to. Redirecting your SEO is much better than starting it all over again.

Using these steps will ensure that your SEO and website traffic remain stable and you can gain strong numbers from day one of your relaunch rather than losing out on the visitors you worked so hard to gain.

Hiring good SEO consultants that provide quality services at affordable prices will give big boost to your business. It will help you attract potential customers and expand your business. The SEO companies offer many services such as, social media marketing, online reputation management, organic search, paid search, building customized links, code optimization and so on.

Every business owner must hire reputed and affordable SEO Services Company to improve their website’s ranking and create brand image online. Before hiring you must check the credibility of the SEO Company and estimated time to achieve the set goals. The terms and conditions of making payments must also be negotiated.

The SEO professionals use a variety of tools and techniques to ensure that their client gets best results. They also offer a variety of services which will benefit your business. Let us look at them.

Social media marketing – In this process, the social media links are created so that websites can gain traffic. The social media marketing campaign works around creating content that gains reader’s attention and it motivates people to share the content on their various social networks.

Online reputation management – This revolves around maintaining and developing online reputation of individuals or businesses. Online reputation management or ORM checks into any harmful content related to the client and manages it effectively by bringing down the negative content through various tools and promoting positive content by adding articles, blogs, etc. . It uses customer feedback surveys on regular basis to understand consumer’s views about the client’s website.

Organic search – Organic SEO refers to various approaches used to gain high ranking on search engine pages with unpaid results that are algorithm-driven. It uses tactics such using good keywords, creating quality content etc.

Building links – Link building is one of the most discussed topic in the SEO industry. Creating backlinks is one of the most important part of any SEO campaign. Building links consumes lot of time and is also very expensive. However, building good quality links is the key to increasing search engine rankings.

Paid search – It is also known as CPC or Cost per click marketing and CPM or cost per impression marketing. In CPC, the advertiser pays the search engine each time an individual clicks on its sponsored links. In CPM, the advertiser pays the search engine for every 1000 times your advertisement appears on the search engine pages.

Code optimization – It includes techniques used to modify codes of a website to improve their quality and efficiency. Codes of a website can be optimized so that they reduce in size, utilize less memory and function more rapidly.

Apart from the above mentioned different types of SEO services, there are website designing, content generation and SEO penalty services as well. You can invite pitches from different SEO companies so that you can compare and get best and most affordable SEO services. Making your website SEO friendly will give you competitive edge in the online market.

In the past, when we needed to find a bakery, an attorney, a doctor or a restaurant, we would look up the Yellow Pages. Today however, we look up search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. to find what we need. Having entered what we’re looking for, we visit the links that are generated through the search, mostly those on the first page, to look for more information on their location, contact number, products or services, clients and other important information or even make reservations or appointments. What’s more, most customers find out the brick and mortar locations of businesses through their websites.

So you can clearly imagine what your business is missing out on by not having a website. Eventually, it’s all affecting your margins. Besides, you’re allowing your competitor to beat you without competing at all. Hence, a website is a very important marketing tool that a business must invest in, to provide information and updates about your company, and attract new customers.

Understand that the point isn't if your website needs a website or not, rather that your customers expect your business to have it. Besides, website creation is quite affordable for small businesses too.

Avail low-cost advertising - The Web has a much deeper and wider reach than any other advertising form. And, while it does take some time to get enough traffic to your website to be able to make your marketing campaign worthwhile, the effort costs close to nothing. Moreover, once you’ve established an online presence through a website, you can now promote it through different mediums such as PPC, social media, etc.

Gain more visibility - To be able to become visible to your target audience online, you must first have a website. No matter how well known your business is in the market, in the present digital age, prospective customers prefer finding out information online first and then walk up to your brick and mortar outlet.

Be accessible to your audience round the clock - By building a website for your business, you can be accessible to your prospective customers round the clock. Customers can browse through your products and company updates or buy in their convenient time. This way you can offer your customers convenience, which is the biggest lookout factor for the modern customer.

We’re living in an era when we look up search engines for the most basic of queries and needs. As such, not having a website for your business is as good as good as saying - I don’t need air to breathe.

So how important do you think websites are for businesses? Share your thoughts and takes with us in the comments below. And, for affordable website SEO services, visit us at SeoTuners.